The Ralph Roughton Paper Award was established in 1998 to honor the founding Chairperson of APsA’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues.  In its first decade, it offered formal recognition to outstanding published papers that deepened our psychoanalytic understanding of gay men and lesbians.   In 2007, the mission of the Award was changed.  In the years that it is awarded, the Ralph Roughton Paper Award is now given to an unpublished manuscript that, in the opinion of the judges, makes an original and outstanding contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding and/or treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans*, or gender-variant people.

The Award carries a cash prize of $1,000 and the author of the winning paper will be invited to present it at the National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York. The winner may submit the paper for review by the Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association and, if accepted, it will be published as the winner of the Ralph Roughton Paper Award.